Mid August Bare Naked Look At Mount Rainier

Saw that which you see here, this morning, on Facebook, via Washington's Miss Chris. I believe this look at Mount Rainier is looking at the Mountain from Tacoma. Perhaps from Point Ruston, near Point Defiance Park.

The Mount Rainier volcano looks like a giant version of the only mountain in the Texas town I am currently in, a manmade mountain I call Mount Wichita, but which is also known as Murphy's Hill.

It is a couple months before snow might start sticking to Mount Rainier. I do not recollect ever seeing the Mountain as bare naked of a frozen covering as what appears to be the case in this photo.

Mount Rainier is home to several glaciers. I assume the white which remains are those glaciers, with last winter's snow long melted.

The snow and any glaciers have long been gone from Mount Wichita. The nearest real mountain is hundreds of miles from my current location.

Unless one counts as real mountains the Wichita Mountains, which are located in Oklahoma, about 60 miles north of my Wichita Falls location...

Miss Chris Takes Us To Mount Rainier This Morning

Saw that which you see here, this morning, on Facebook, via Miss Chris, she being one of my favorite Washingtonians.

Miss Chris and Miss Sheila built themselves a new home in the Washington town named Lacey. Lacey is a short distance east of Olympia.

At Chris and Sheila's previous location in the Seattle suburb of Kent they did not have a direct view of Mount Rainier.

As you can see, at their new location, Mount Rainier is an easily seen close by neighbor.

It looks like Mount Rainier has lost most of its snow covering. Seems a bit early in the melting time of the year for the Mountain to be this bald.

At my current flat location, no matter which direction I look, for hundreds of miles, there is nothing like Mount Rainier to be seen on the horizon...

If Miss Julie The Texan Moves To Washington She Will Need To Get Used To Volcanic Lenticulars

This morning upon the arrival of the sun I was greeted by a site the likes of which it is impossible for me to see at my location in Texas.

That being a mountain with the semi-rare phenomenon of two cap clouds, known as lenticulars, hovering above the mountain, like a pair of flying saucers from the 1950s.

This mountain we are looking at here is known as Mount Rainier. Mount Rainier is the tallest mountain in Washington and one of Washington's five active volcanoes.

Last night Fort Worth's renowned botanist, known as Miss Julie, the Plant Lady of the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens, verbalized to me her reluctance to move to Western Washington due to her aversion to the almost non-stop cloud cover and cold she has been experiencing this winter in Texas.

I assured Miss Julie that while clouds may hover over Western Washington, for what seems like forever, particularly in winter, that there are often breaks from the gloom, and ways to escape the gloom, such has heading east over the mountains to usually sunny Eastern Washington, or heading west to the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains where desert levels of rainfall falls annually.

In Texas, no matter what direction Miss Julie chooses to go, there is no outer world relief from the gray gloom when it decides to descend upon North Texas, not for hundreds and hundreds of miles.....

Having Myself A Happy 68th Birthday In Flat Texas

I am up early, again, on this, the second Wednesday of August. I know you are wondering if the picture is the view from my patio, this morning, as I sit outside, in the pre-dawn morning chill, of 81 degrees, drinking coffee.

I wish that was my patio view, but, sadly, no matter what direction I look from my current location I will see neither a mountain or a waterfall.

What you are looking at, in the picture, is Mount Rainier, with the top of Myrtle Falls in the foreground. Mount Rainier is a mountain in Washington. The tallest. It's the only iconic image on the Washington license plate, unlike the Texas plate which is cluttered with a lot of little images, some of which make sense to me.

In about 7 hours it will be exactly 2 years since I last saw Mount Rainier up close. I can remember this precisely because 2 years ago, today, on my birthday, I went to Mount Rainier. It does not seem like it can already be 2 years since I nearly fell to my death from a ladder on Mount Rainier, well, more accurately, from a ladder very near to Mount Rainier.

The latch I was holding on to broke loose, sending me, nearly, falling backwards.

So, today I turn 68. I really don't feel that old, I feel older. I do my age calculation by adding my chronological age to how old I feel to how old I look and then divide by 3 to arrive at today's age of 68.

The feeling old is coming from I'm being very sore, in a decrepit sort of way. Sore muscles, and my feet are aching. Like I'm thinking what the joints and bones in my feet and knees are aching like is what old people mean when they say their rheumatism is acting up.

Now that I'm a Senior Citizen I'm getting what old folks mean when they say getting old is not easy. And don't get me started on the trauma of my hair falling out. It's constantly annoying. At least it hasn't gone gray yet, so I suppose I should be grateful for that.

That's me and my Mount Rainier Happy Birthday date, Janet, on the left, in the picture, with Mount Rainier behind us. I've aged so much in 2 years I don't think I could convince a young lady, like Janet, to go up a mountain with me anymore.

But, there are plenty of old ladies out there who might be willing to go up a mountain with a 68 year old geezer. If only there were any mountains within a 300 mile range of my current forlorn location.

I have no idea what is ahead of me today, on my hopefully happy, 68th birthday.

Except, for being fairly certain, in a few minutes, I will be swimming. After that, who knows?

News From Texas That Mount Rainier Put On A Flying Saucer Show Last Friday

I just got an interesting email from the Songbird of the Texas Gulf Coast, Alma, down in Port Aransas, sending me pictures of some cool-looking cloud formations that swirled above Mount Rainier in my old state of residence, that being Washington, supposedly this past Friday.

Drivers were pulling to the side of Interstate 5 to take pictures.

Way back on June 24, 1947 a pilot named Kenneth A. Arnold coined the term "flying saucer" to describe 9 unusual objects he observed flying in a chain near Mount Rainier, heading towards Mount Adams at what amounted to supersonic speeds at a time in history when no earthly planes had broken the sound barrier.

After he described the flying object's shape as looking like a flat saucer or disc and described their motion as being like that of a saucer skipping across water the press quickly grabbed hold of the term "flying saucer," many of which were reported being seen in the following days.

This singular event ignited the UFO phenomenon that continues off and on to this day, as in last winter, or was it the winter before, there was a UFO widely reported to have been seen down by Stephenville, here in Texas.

Arnold's account was found to be highly credible. And then it was corroborated by others who had witnessed the same thing and were equally credible. In the days that followed numerous other credible witnesses described seeing stuff in the sky over Washington they'd not seen before. And then on Day 10 came a primary corroborative sighting, this time by a United Airlines crew over Idaho on their way to Seattle who saw disk-like objects pacing their plane.

The next day Arnold met with the pilot, Captain, E. J. Smith, and co-pilot, to compare the details of what they saw. Within days there were sightings over Tulsa, Oklahoma and Phoenix, Arizona.

The last photo of flying saucer like clouds swirling around Mount Rainier is the view from Gig Harbor. Gig Harbor is on the Olympic Peninsula on the other side of the Narrows from Tacoma, accessed by parallel suspension bridges.

These spectacular cloud formations are called lenticular clouds. They occur when the air flow over Mount Rainier hits a precise condition where the air gets pushed up, then cools and condenses into clouds. A moist onshore flow preceding an incoming rainstorm sets up the conditions that makes these clouds.